The new Brics development bank formally launched in Shanghai on Tuesday, with representatives from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa envisioning a nimbler, more responsive alternative to institutions such as the World Bank.

The inauguration of the lender, officially called the New Development Bank, comes less than a month after the launch of the China-led Asia Infrastructure Development Bank, which similarly aims to create a parallel global investment institution in which developing countries have greater influence.

Ambrósio Vilhalva was a Guarani leader who spent decades campaigning against the planting of sugar cane on his tribe’s former lands. Vilhalva starred in the award-winning film Birdwatchers and traveled the world to speak about the Brazilian government’s failure to protect native Guarani land. In December 2013, after months of death threats, Vilhalva was found dead in his hut from multiple stab wounds.

Edwin Chota was an activist leader of Peru’s Ashaninka people who for years fought against illegal logging in the Amazon, going so far as to confront armed loggers with a machete in his hand. In September 2014, Chota and three other Ashinanka men were ambushed somewhere on the Brazilian-Peruvian border and gunned down with shotguns.

In Argentina, the middle class, especially the private petite bourgeoisie, supported the neo-liberal Menem regime in the 1990’s. Their support was based on cheap credit (low interest rates), cheap imports of consumer goods, a dollarized economy and an expanding economy based on overseas borrowing. With the economic crises (1999-2002) and collapse of the economy (December 2001-December 2002), the middle class saw their bank accounts frozen, lost their jobs, businesses went bankrupt and poverty affected over 50% of the population. As a result, the middle class ‘radicalized’: they took to the streets in a mass rebellion protesting in front of banks, the Congress and the Presidential palace. Throughout the major cities, middle class neighborhoods formed popular assemblies and fraternized with the unemployed workers organizations (piqueteros) in blocking all the major highways and streets. This spontaneous middle class rebellion adopted the apolitical slogan Que se vayan todos! – All Politicians Out! – reflecting a rejection of the neo-liberal status quo but also of any radical solution. The left public employees trade union (CTA) and the right-wing private sector union (CGT) provided little in the way of leadership – at best individual members played a role in the new social movements based in the villa de miseria – the vast urban slums. The left and Marxist parties intervened to fragment the mass unemployed workers movement while over-ideologizing and dissolving the middle class neighborhood assemblies. By the middle of 2003, the middle class shifted to electoral politics and voted for Kirchner who campaigned as a ‘center-left’ social democrat. Beginning in 2003, world commodity prices rose significantly, Argentina postponed and later lowered its debt payments and Kirchner stabilized the economy, unfroze the bank accounts of the middle class who then shifted toward the center.

As the world focuses on the World Cup, which opens in Brazil in less than a fortnight, many Brazilians are wrestling with painful discoveries about the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. The BBC has found evidence that the UK actively collaborated with the generals – and trained them in sophisticated interrogation techniques.Brazil’s 21-year dictatorship is less well known abroad than that of Argentina or Chile, but it was still brutal. Hundreds died and thousands were imprisoned and tortured.One of those tortured was a left-wing guerrilla who is now the country’s president, Dilma Rousseff. She set up a Truth Commission to unearth long-buried facts about the past.

The social-protection paradigm that emerged at the end of the 19th century and developed, in parallel with the workers’ movements, during the 20th, aimed to protect and equalize access and opportunities, irrespective of income level and social status. In this model, the structure of social spending prized not only income security but above all the promotion of equity and convergence. By contrast, the hegemonic paradigm of the 21st century holds that market mechanisms are the key to improving general welfare; cash transfers and expanded household debt, the latter underwritten by the former, are the key elements in this framework, in which decommodified provision is to be pared to the barest bones. What is taking place—spurred on by the ‘success story’ of ccts—is a downsizing of social protection in the name of the poor. Over the past six years these programmes have benefited from boom conditions, as surplus capital flooded into ‘emerging economies’ from the crisis-stricken advanced capitalist zones. Yet how they will weather a reversal of capital flows and tightening of credit, if quantitative easing in the North finally starts to slow, remains to be seen.

Since 1985, the MST has peacefully occupied unused land where they have established cooperative farms, constructed houses, schools for children and adults and clinics, promoted indigenous cultures and a healthy and sustainable environment and gender equality. The MST has won land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements as a result of MST actions, and 180,000 encamped families currently await government recognition. Land occupations are rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, which says land that remains unproductive should be used for a “larger social function.”